Elizabeth David: The writer who transformed British life

The cookery writer brought about a revolution in our eating habits, but she
saw the merits of a Bath bun as well as a pizza

Later in life, Elizabeth David took to writing about the most undervalued cuisine, that of EnglandPhoto: The Elizabeth David Archive

By Melanie McDonagh

4:24PM GMT 16 Nov 2013

This year has real significance for anyone who eats or cooks for pleasure. It is the centenary of the birth of Elizabeth David – who was born on Boxing Day 1913. To say that Mrs David’s influence is still with us is to underestimate the scale of the revolution she brought about in the British way of eating. She introduced the Brits to the cooking of Greece, Italy and Provence in 1950 after her return from Greece, via Egypt and India, with her first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food. It was commissioned by John Lehmann, after every other publisher had turned it down, and given a dazzling cover by John Minton. Until then, as Jane Grigson – one of her devotees – observed, “Basil was no more than the name of bachelor uncles, courgette was printed in italics as an alien word, and few of us knew how to eat spaghetti…Then came Elizabeth David, like sunshine.”

So the very fact that Brits now eat pasta as much a potatoes and use olive oil more than dripping owes an awful lot to her. (She was also one of the first to spot how readily Brits could traduce the Italian food they adopted as their own – her views on supermarket pizza were trenchant.) Her classic French Provincial Cooking (1960) was a celebration of the notion of food linked to the land where it’s grown.

But there’s more to her than the woman who reminded war-weary Brits about the existence of lemons. She was one of the first and much the classiest of the personality food writers, even though she was never a telly chef: paving the way for Jamie, Nigella, Nigel and Hugh F-W. Nearly every British cook you’ve ever heard about or watched or read is in her debt, and will say so. Previously, the cooks who made their mark on the British psyche were grand French chefs like Escoffier, or women such as Mrs Beeton, who was less a cook than a compiler. Elizabeth David was widely read in magazines such as Vogue and The Spectator, and her books quite simply transformed the food culture – the late Auberon Waugh observed that if he were asked to name the woman who, more than anyone, had improved life in 20th-century Britain, he would name her. She was put on postage stamps for the Queen’s Jubilee last year as one of the 60 most influential Britons of her reign. I’d put her, myself, in the top 10.

Yet the crucial thing about her is often overlooked, which is that she was a food writer. Like most women of her class (her grandfather was a viscount) and generation, she was under-educated by comparison with her male peers – her diploma course at the Sorbonne as a young woman was a run-through of French culture – but she was widely read and travelled and shrewdly observant. She could be wonderfully forthright – of people who add to recipes as they go, she wrote that “the ones who can’t resist a different little piece of embroidery every time they cook a dish will end by inducing a mood of gloomy apprehension in their families and guests”.

Yet she had her lyrical side – writing about a farmer preparing saffron in a village in Spain, she describes how “the heap of discarded crocus petals made a splash of intense and pure colour, shining like a pool of quicksilver in the cavernous shadows of the village living room”; none of the telly chefs write like that. She valued simplicity.

Which is why, later in life, she took to writing about the most undervalued cuisine, that of England. Her book, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), was not just a manifesto for the artisan breadmakers who are everywhere nowadays (and if you’re eating a chewy home-baked loaf rather than loaf-shaped sliced carbohydrate in plastic, you owe her a lot); it was a homage (not uncritical) to the traditions of the English kitchen. She could see the merits of a Bath bun as well as a pizza. As she wrote in Queen magazine, “Any human being possessed of sufficient gumption to track down a source of fresh yeast – it isn’t all that rare – and collected enough to remember to buy at the same time a pound or two of plain flour, get it home, take a mixing bowl and a measuring jug from the cupboard, and read a few simple instructions, can make a decent loaf of bread.” Quite.

Reading her wonderful Summer Cooking (1955), a couple of things strike you. One is that she anticipated our contemporary preoccupation with seasonal produce by about 40 years: as she says, “summer cooking means the extraction of maximum enjoyment out of the produce which grows in the summer season and is appropriate to it”. The other is that some of it is very English (it drew in part on the garden food of her childhood) and quite simple. Her recipe for blackcurrant purée, for instance, is as straightforward as can be – just two or three ingredients – and it’s sublime. Simplicity like that is rare: a contemporary writer would add personal flourishes and make it worse.

There’s a common assumption that English food has always been rubbish and Elizabeth David made it less so by making cooking here more Mediterranean, but that wasn’t the case. Post-war British food was, indeed, wonderfully bad – she was very funny about how bad – but it wasn’t always so. Mrs David was well grounded in the early English food writers and the culinary traditions of England. And if modern Brits have taken to heart her passion for Mediterranean ingredients and cooking, they seem to have pretty well missed her appreciation of things like veal and ham pie.

We’re awash now with cookbooks, sated with television cookery programmes. Elizabeth David was the forerunner of them all. A hundred years after her birth, she’s still worth reading and learning from.